O’rourke’s alienation from the married woman comes in part because she’s filling in the imaginative blank of that woman’s union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don’t fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain.

O’rourke’s alienation from the married woman comes in part because she’s filling in the imaginative blank of that woman’s union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don’t fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain.

– Rebecca Traister –

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

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